1. Field
A robot cleaner and a method for controlling a robot cleaner are disclosed herein.
2. Background
In general, robots initially developed for industrial purposes have played a key part in factory automation. Recently, application fields of robots have been further extended to include medical robots, aerospace robots, and even home robots that may be used in homes have also been produced.
A typical example of a home robot is a robot cleaner. A robot cleaner is a type of electronic device capable of sucking in ambient dust or foreign objects, while moving in a predetermined area. Recently, robot cleaners including various functions in addition to a basic cleaning function as mentioned above have been developed, and robot cleaners equipped with a monitoring function to monitor a predetermined area and sense an abnormal situation have been introduced.
For example, a robot cleaner, which may be positioned in a particular spot within a predetermined area, capture four images, while rotating at a current location by about 90 degrees each time, and deliver the same to a previously registered remote terminal has been presented. However, although an installed battery of the robot cleaner has limited power, the robot cleaner may continuously rotate and capture images, causing a large amount of power consumption, and as the robot cleaner continuously transmits captured images to a remote terminal, there is a problem in terms of communication efficiency of the robot cleaner.
Meanwhile, in a case in which a robot cleaner performs cleaning in an area to be cleaned (or a cleaning area) according to a user command or a pre-set schedule, continuously performing cleaning on the entire cleaning region by the robot cleaner with limited power may inevitably frequently move from a current location to a charging station, causing a problem in terms of power consumption.
Thus, a technique capable of addressing the foregoing problems is urgently required.